Beijing's new Daxing International Airport set to be world's largest

Beijing : The world's largest airport set to open in late 2019, with eight runways serving 100 million passengers annually is Beijing's Daxing International.

The Civil Aviation Adminis-tration of China (CAAC) announced Beijing's new airport will be called Beijing Daxing International Airport, confirming it will open September 30, 2019.

The name comes from the locality where the airport is being built: Daxing, a district in southern Beijing.

Daxing International will open with an initial capacity of 45 million passengers a year, compared to the designed capacity of 85 million a year at Beijing Capital International Airport, which actually handled 95.8 million in 2017.

When Phase 1 is complete in 2025, the airport would be able to handle 70 million passengers, two million tons of freight and 620,000 takeoffs and landings a year.

SkyTeam members China Southern Airlines and China Eastern Airlines will be main anchor operators at the facility.

For a project of this scale, there's a planned "air transport-related economic zone," but that's not going to provide any relief for Chinese business aviation. Operators are expected to struggle daily for capacity at airports in China, states Forbes magazine.

Daxing appears to be an opportunity lost for business aviation, with three big commercial service providers_ Air China, China Eastern and China Southern_ already vying for space in this airport in Beijing's southern suburbs.

The hope for business aviation may be that the opening of Daxing will free up capacity at the existing Beijing Capital International Airport, which is not much of a silver lining, Forbes predicts.